Science fiction and God

I've been doing a brief study of early science fiction; looking at it from a Christian and creationist point of view. In this post I want to look at one of the most famous short stories in the genre.

The Star - Arthur C. Clarke [see note #1. for summary of plot]

Quotes and comments;

A. 'It is three thousand light years to the Vatican. Once, I believed that space could have no power over faith, just as I believed that the heavens declared the glory of God's handiwork. Now I have seen that handiwork, and my faith is sorely troubled.'

B. "Well, Father," he would say at last, "it goes on forever and forever, and perhaps Something made it. But how you can believe that Something has a special interest in us and our miserable little world--that just beats me."

- Why call earth a 'miserable' little world? What makes earth mean, shameful or contemptible? [the meanings of miserable] You see this kind of comment a lot in science fiction - and why? What sense does it make? Do all the imaginary worlds of science fiction somehow make earth less of a miracle? Less of an incredible place? Isn't it these writers who are the miserable little ones? (to use their own words)

- How does the vastness of space (with its vast emptiness as well) diminish the wonder of earth? Earth could only be a 'miserable' place if there was some planet more wonderful... but how could such a thing be? And there is no such place.... such a place only exists' in the imagination of the sf writer... and I've never come across a planet yet that could be described as better than earth. (I don't think it's possible to imagine a planet more wonderful than earth; and maybe that ought to tell us something.) I realize that some dreamers have claimed earth could be improved on (e.g. no earthquakes, even more mild weather, etc.) but these critiques have largely been shown to be based on ignorance... i.e. the earth seems indeed to be the best of all possible worlds.

- Why would anyone see earth as contemptible? as cheap? These are cavalier remarks, not worthy of serious consideration... made only to make a point, made only in the service of rhetoric, in the service of winning an argument. (i.e. no one really thinks earth is mean, shameful or contemptible.)

- Why is it so hard for the natural man to give thanks?

- If the earth is a miserable place why aren't the opinions of its inhabitants also miserable; i.e. mean, shameful and contemptible? But somehow natural man believes his ideas about things are anything But miserable; despite his place of origin.

C. 'Will my report on the Phoenix Nebula end our thousand years of history? It will end, I fear, much more than that.

- Clarke here is hinting that discoveries made by scientists (about the physical universe) can have devastating effects on religious beliefs, specifically on christian beliefs. (This is the old fear, or hope, that 'science' will kill off all religious ideas.)

D. 'The Rubens engraving of Loyola seems to mock me as it hangs there above the spectrophotometer tracings. What would you, Father, have made of this knowledge that has come into my keeping, so far from the little world that was all the universe you knew? Would your faith have risen to the challenge, as mine has failed to do?

- The idea is that people in the past were Christians only because they were ignorant. i.e. yes, great scientists like Kepler, etc. were Christians, but only because they knew so little. If they had known what Arthur Clarke knew, they too would have lost their faith, they too would have been atheists.

On the book you are holding the words are plain to read. AD MAJOREM DEI GLORIAM, the message runs, but it is a message I can no longer believe. Would you still believe it, if you could see what we have found?
- i.e. to the greater glory of god.

E. 'We knew, of course, what the Phoenix Nebula was. Every year, in our galaxy alone, more than a hundred stars explode, blazing for a few hours or days with thousands of times their normal brilliance before they sink back into death and obscurity. Such are the ordinary novae--the commonplace disasters of the universe.

- Why is an exploding star a disaster? maybe stars have to explode, maybe they have to explode to keep the universe in existence... but why should it be seen as a bad thing? [disaster has its root in star; i.e. a bad event caused by a certain 'conjunction' of the stars. In other words the idea is one of astrology.] It's certainly not a tragedy.

F. 'When the star had exploded, its outer layers had been driven upward with such speed that they had escaped completely from its gravitational field. Now they formed a hollow shell large enough to engulf a thousand solar systems, and at its center burned the tiny, fantastic object which the star had now become--a White Dwarf, smaller than the Earth, yet weighing a million times as much.'

G. 'No one seriously expected to find planets. If there had been any before the explosion, they would have been boiled into puffs of vapor, and their substance lost in the greater wreckage of the star itself. But we made the automatic search, as we always do when approaching an unknown sun, and presently we found a single small world circling the star at an immense distance. It must have been the Pluto of this vanished solar system, orbiting on the frontiers of the night. Too far from the central sun ever to have known life, its remoteness had saved it from the fate of all its lost companions.
- Would it be possible for a planet to survive a supernova?

H. 'The passing fires had seared its rocks and burned away the mantle of frozen gas that must have covered it in the days before the disaster. We landed, and we found the Vault.'

I. 'Its builders had made sure that we would. The monolithic marker that stood above the entrance was now a fused stump, but even the first long-range photographs told us that here was the work of intelligence.'
- Our narrator can spot intelligence, even from outer space. (Maybe Clarke was into this ID stuff.)

J. 'A little later we detected the continent-wide pattern of radioactivity that had been buried in the rock. Even if the pylon above the Vault had been destroyed, this would have remained, an immovable and all but eternal beacon calling to the stars. Our ship fell toward this gigantic bull's-eye like an arrow into its target.'

K. 'Our original purpose was forgotten: this lonely monument, reared with such labor at the greatest possible distance from the doomed sun, could have only one meaning. A civilization that knew it was about to die had made its last bid for immortality.

- Not only can they recognize design (and not merely the appearance of design, as Squawkins would say) they can detect meaning.

L. 'We have examined many of these records, and brought to life for the first time in six thousand years the warmth and beauty of a civilization that in many ways must have been superior to our own.

- Over and over, like some kind of (Tibetan) mantra, we hear how these imagined alien civilizations are superior to our own. (I guess this is some kind of warped utopianism. ie. if utopia isn't possible on earth, it might be possible on some alien world. Why? We're not told.)

M. 'One scene is still before my eyes--a group of children on a beach of strange blue sand, playing in the waves as children play on Earth.'
- Our narrator can detect not only design, but knows play when he sees it.

N. 'And sinking into the sea, still warm and friendly and life-giving, is the sun that will soon turn traitor and obliterate all this innocent happiness.'

- So very often aliens are seen as innocent; as unfallen you might say. i.e. man is some awful brute, some evil creature, but aliens are innocent and good; like good angels you might say.

O. 'This tragedy was unique. It is one thing for a race to fail and die, as nations and cultures have done on Earth. But to be destroyed so completely in the full flower of its achievement, leaving no survivors - how could that be reconciled with the mercy of God?

- Clarke sets this up by mentioning the innocence of the aliens (or at least of their children)
- Is the story a comment on the Christian doctrine of a final judgment?
- The idea is this; a supernova wiped out a planet, therefore (since god is merciful) is no God. i.e. if there was a god this couldn't have happened. (How might god have prevented it? we're not told)

P. 'My colleagues have asked me that, and I have given what answers I can. Perhaps you could have done better, Father Loyola, but I have found nothing in the Exercitia Spiritualia that helps me here. They were not an evil people: I do not know what gods they worshiped, if indeed they worshiped any.
But I have looked back at them across the centuries, and have watched while the loveliness they used their last strength to preserve was brought forth again into the light of their shrunken sun. They could have taught us much: why were they destroyed?'

- This is special pleading of a radical sort... one hears the most immoral of lawyers speaking.
- Our narrator not only knows design when he sees it; he knows these people weren't evil. I guess this means they were unfallen. (As in Perelandra by C S Lewis.) I doubt this is what Clarke means; as I don't think he'd have said humans are evil either.
- How can he possibly know they could have taught an alien species anything? It seems implausible to me.
- Why were they destroyed? This sounds like it was an intentional act. i.e. he could have said, 'why did they die?' or 'why did they have to die?' or 'why did the star have to explode?' etc.

Q. 'I know the answers that my colleagues will give when they get back to Earth. They will say that the universe has no purpose and no plan, that since a hundred suns explode every year in our galaxy, at this very moment some race is dying in the depths of space. Whether that race has done good or evil during its lifetime will make no difference in the end: there is no divine justice, for there is no God.'

- This sounds like the old argument; there is no divine justice, therefore there is no god. That sounds like a good argument, but is it? To know whether or not it is, we have to know what divine justice is. The trouble for the atheist is that he doesn't know what it is, and has no way of knowing what it is. What he does is borrow the Christian idea of justice, and then use it as an argument against Christianity. i.e. if there is no god there cannot be such a thing as divine justice (or any kind of justice for that matter) If man rejects god he rejects any meaningful idea of divine justice. This being the case, his argument for the non-existence of god collapses.

- If there is no God, we can't know whether a race was good or evil. (That so many aliens are seen as good, in an ideal (unfallen sense) looks like projection. ie. looks like an expression of how the sf writer sees himself.
- the story is so well told that we might forget that it's all imaginary. As far as we know there are no alien races... so the claim some race is dying somewhere in space all the time (a bleak a view of the universe as I've ever come across) is more special pleading... of an extreme sort. (I don't believe for a second this is true.)

R. 'This I could have accepted, hard though it is to look upon whole worlds and peoples thrown into the furnace. But there comes a point when even the deepest faith must falter, and now, as I look at the calculations lying before me, I know I have reached that point at last.'

- For all his foppish atheism, Clarke was from the old school in that he wanted to have good reasons for rejecting the God of Christianity. (Among young writers atheism is so taken for granted that no reason seems necessary. ie. C. isn't something you need a good argument to reject, it's just an embarassment to avoid.) He wanted to say, ''I would have like to have believed, but the evidence you see was all against its being true."

S. 'We could not tell, before we reached the nebula, how long ago the explosion took place. Now, from the astronomical evidence and the record in the rocks of that one surviving planet, I have been able to date it very exactly. I know in what year the light of this colossal conflagration reached our Earth. I know how brilliantly the supernova whose corpse now dwindles behind our speeding ship once shone in terrestrial skies. I know how it must have blazed low in the east before sunrise, like a beacon in that oriental dawn.
There can be no reasonable doubt: the ancient mystery is solved at last. Yet, oh God, there were so many stars you could have used. What was the need to give these people to the fire, that the symbol of their passing might shine above Bethlehem?

- How's that for a kicker! In case you didn't get it (people reading blogs read so quickly and carelessly) what Christians call the star of Bethlehem (that led the wise men to the crib where the baby Jesus lay) was the very star that destroyed this wonderful and innocent alien civilization. Clarke earlier in his story mentions blasphemy ('It is arrogance--it is perilously near blasphemy--for us to say what He may or may not do.') and here he was surely stepped into it with both feet. He compares the death of an alien civilization to a bit of celebration fireworks. He's accusing god of not caring a whit for this alien civilization. (He could have used so many other stars we're told.) Why might this be? I suppose it could only be that God only cares about human beings. This seems odd, so we have to restate the idea as; god doesn't exist, since a god that only cared about one intelligent race wouldn't be a god at all. (i.e. an evil demon at best) i.e. the Christian God can't be God, since he doesn't care about these wonderful aliens.

Summary; 5/5
- The story is an argument against God's existence, based on the amount of evil in the world that happens to the innocent. This is an old argument, but it's survived for the reason it's the most powerful, the most emotionally compelling.
- Clarke seems to be saying, if the God of the bible is real, I don't want to believe in God. Since I don't believe any real God would act like the way the God of the bible acts, I don't believe the God of the bible is the true God. (That at least seems to be the point made by the story.)
- Clarke's message is this; that if the god of the bible exists, he's the worst monster imaginable; one who snuffs out a cosmic civilization every day.
- His choice of a narrator is brilliant. Portraying his critiques of Christianity as sincere questions of someone losing their faith, adds power to the story.
- You have to have a special (twisted?) kind of imagination to turn a beautiful Christ card image celebrating the birth of Jesus, and turn it into a vicious against Christianity. (I read an essay once where the author claimed sf was all about tearing down icons; we see that spirit at work in this story.)

Notes;
1. Summary of 'The Star' - by Arthur C. Clark [won Hugo for 1956; published 1955]
- A spaceship is sent from earth to investigate a supernova (why they would have to travel there I don't know). One of their member is a Jesuit priest, who is an astrophysicist. They discover that one planet has survived the blast (would this be possible?). They discover signs of intelligent life on this planet. It seems that aliens who had lived on one of the inner planets (Clarke seems to have imagined an earth like solar system; one that as far as we know is unique) left some kind of monument to their 'race' on this outer planet... somehow knowing or hoping it would survive the blast and thus leave a record of their existence. Why they would do this we're not told. (Maybe they had sf writers of their own.)
- the story can be found online.
2. That I happened to read this story today (i.e. so close to Christmas) was a fluke. I've been doing a bit of a study of science fiction, going through the best of the stories from the early days. (I started with the 1930s.)
- this is not an article, just rough notes I made as I was reading. (Not notes I made after reading it.)
3. This story is reminiscent of an earlier story called 'Rescue Party (1946). I believe this was his first published story. In it the earth's sun is about to go nova. Aliens aliens show up to save some of the doomed earthlings... but don't find any. The aliens in the story are part of some 'group' that goes around the universe saving civilizations from exploding stars. I think we can take this as evidence this was a theme he'd been thinking of a long time before he wrote The Star.
4. There's a small book that features some letters passed between CS Lewis and Arthur Clarke. It's not all that interesting, but you might want to at least read the letters. (There are only a few.)